Haylee’s Corner: The Clean Up

Every Friday, our intern Haylee Myren blogs about her life and journey as a college senior. 

Like many of you I was told my whole life to watch what I posted on social media. Did I listen?

...Of course not.

I get it, everyone was young once. Everyone used to post things that were embarrassing that they once thought was funny or cool—but is really just dumb and unprofessional. When you’re young you don’t think about your future employer going through your social media accounts and creeping on you. You don’t take that extra second to stop and think, “Could this post affect my chances at getting a future job?”

Trust me I get it. I didn’t think about my social media accounts and how they could affect my professional life until first semester of college year.

AND the ONLY reason I started thinking about it is because I was enrolled in a class called “Communicating in an Online Era”, where the Professor honed in on our professional identities online.

If you haven’t thought about it, or gone through your social media accounts, I suggest you go do that…

...NOW!--Before you have a professor who goes through everyone’s social media accounts and makes an embarrassing or unprofessional slide show of everyone’s worst posts online. Or, even worse… before your future employers hit the web searching your name.

Okay, so you go check out your social media accounts and you find heaps of things you don’t want future employers to see… Now what?

No fear—I’m writing today to share some tricks with you on ways you can clear up your social media accounts.Twitter. Instagram. Facebook.

These seem to be the three main social media accounts of our time, so let’s dive into the clean up.

Twitter—If you had a twitter account when you were in high school or even worse, middle school, I guarantee you have some tweets that you probably want deleted. You probably have so many tweets on your account that you can’t even go back and see all the things you used to post.

You might ask me, “Why don’t I just delete my twitter account?” You can! If you want to but nowadays employers want to see your interests and your thoughts on things, so it may look better to just clean up your twitter, and begin to post about things related to your job field.

I am a Communication major so I need social media accounts for employers to see how I communicate online and brand myself. For this reason, I found a link that clears your entire twitter account. Yes--pictures, tweets, retweets, and even likes.

I used Tweet Delete at the beginning of my senior year and cleaned up my entire twitter account. Seriously, give it try.

Instagram—Cleaning up this social media platform is a little more time consuming. You have to go through and individually erase pictures, friends, and comments. If you have a lot of pictures (like I did) it can take HOURS. Sadly, I don’t have any tricks or links to make this process easier…But TRUST me when I tell you it is worth it to clean up your social media account.

Facebook—This social media account is the worst to try and clean up. You have to manually go through and delete every single status, picture, friend, and comment. You can delete full albums and you can hide entire albums for “just your eyes” to see though. Just click, ”Photos”, “Albums”, click on the album you want to delete or make private, click “delete album” in the right corner to completely delete an album, or click  “privacy”, then click either “public, friends, friends except acquaintances, only me, or custom” to control who gets to see that album of photos (if you don’t want to erase all your old photos).

If your Facebook account has TOO many things to singly go through and delete you may have to just delete your account and make a new one. Or, (another secretive tip): you could use your middle name after your first name instead of your last name. Ex : Haylee Elizabeth instead of Haylee Myren.

Lastly, don’t forget that on all social media accounts you can go private or at least control how much other people can view on your pages.

You can’t go back in time and tell yourself to listen when people told you to watch what you’re posting on social media, but you can use some tricks and tips and clean up those accounts. Now that I’ve shared all of my social media clean up tactics, and my future employers can see this, hopefully I’ll still get a job after graduation.

Keep following my journey as I figure out how to successfully maneuver all aspects of being a senior in College.

Until next week—Keep holding on tight, riding that roller-coaster of emotions, and enjoying college while you can.

--Haylee